First World Luxuries

Chef, food critic and television personality Anthony Bourdain is a devilishly intelligent guy.

Last year on HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher,” Maher asked Bourdain, “If you had to choose between average sex and a great meal, which would you choose?” With precision comedic timing, Bourdain winked, “Depends on who’s doin’ the cookin’ and who’s doin’ the fuckin’.”

For all it’s locker room charm, that quote wasn’t as thought provoking as another Bourdain quote that my son, Cal recently shared with me. On Bourdain’s Travel Channel show, “No Reservations,” he was in a third-world country eating meat from an exotic local animal, and when asked about vegetarians back in America, he quipped, “Vegetarianism is a first-world luxury.”

I love a confrontational quote that begs soulful self-examination. And it was delivered with a layer of indictment that’s hard to ignore, as if luxuries are to be apologized for.

I shared the quote (about vegetarians) with a friend who is not only a chef and a vegetarian, but also a fan of Bourdain. Unfortunately, this friend doesn’t really like to be provoked with self-examination. Her momentary silence and tightened body language revealed she was taken aback (and from my experience, vegetarians are prone to being taken aback – that’s how they became vegetarians!), so I took pity and offered a sympathetic comeback: “Quality education is a first world luxury. Sanitary drinking water, sewer systems, a criminal justice system, air traffic control systems and national elections, to randomly name just a few, are all first-world luxuries.” She was soothed and echoed my comments with a sorta, “Yeah, to what you just said.”

But to focus on that alone ignores the complexity of Bourdain’s observation. Those living in the relative ease of the first world have the safety, comfort, and plenty to choose beyond today’s dire necessities. We can say, “Oh, I won’t eat that, because I’ve decided it’s not ethical treatment of animals,” or “it’s not healthy.” But people in the 3^rd world often have to eat what they have to eat. They may never get a chance at self-actualizing such decisions because they have more pressing worries: hunger, safety, and weather extremes.

But does that mean we have to apologize or feel guilty because we can choose to eat what we want to eat? I don’t dress or house my family like people in the 3^rd world (if you ignore my son, Jack, who chooses to dress that way). As much as I wish the world’s poor had more, I’m not sorry for my circumstances. I’m grateful.

I think Bourdain’s quote was a bit of a cheap shot. And Bourdain does it a lot. He often compares vegetarians to picky eaters who drag everybody else down when traveling and dining with their fussy sensibilities. But when I think of first-world luxuries, I do think of people who have the luxury to fear and disdain that which others less fortunate would kill for.

For instance I know a number of people who refuse to vaccinate their children, convinced that it’s dangerous. The staggering swath of medical history and worldwide child mortality data you have to ignore to become a vaccination-phobe speaks to the isolation of the first-world experience.

Like President Franklin Roosevelt, my aunt Beverly suffered from polio. She spent part of her childhood in an iron lung. You know how modern-day people who refuse to vaccinate their children get away without vaccinating them against polio? Because the rest of us do! Providing a safe cultural pool for their kids to swim in.

Look at countries without widespread vaccinations and you find countries with high infant mortality and a level of childhood misery that is Biblical in its gushing heartache. But in the first world, you can live like all that never happens . . . or isn’t even true. Instead, you take your relative safety from disease for granted and obsess over side issues.

The vaccination-phobes remind me of people I’ve met who are afraid to fly. They talk forever about how airplanes can fall from the sky, but can’t seem to focus when you share travel data that proves hands-down that it’s more dangerous to drive than to fly. They instead tell you stories about airline mechanics who let dangerous planes fly or pilots who drink before they go to work. Share yet more unmistakable data again and they find another obscure objection. They’re focused on the emotional, a place where the rational has no power.

Only in the first world, where there is no longer any polio (thanks to vaccinations) can you get hyper-focused on the minute percentage of kids proven to have a negative reaction to vaccinations. In the 3^rd world, people have to spend their time worrying about the far, far, far higher percentage of children who get polio.

In the comfort of the first world: emotions, minus scientific observations can equal reality. Call me a science nerd, but I like to do it the other way around, adding up scientific observation and subtracting emotion.

And I have friends here in central Indiana who insist on commuting in large 4-wheel drive SUVs, “because they’re safer.” We live in just about the flattest place in the world, in a county with not a single gravel road, with some of the safest, best designed highways in the world, but they feel unsafe without all that metal and those gear ratios on their side. They need an urban assault vehicle or they just won’t feel right.

First world luxury indeed! Think India or Cambodia and a scooter with an entire family perched atop it.

Several years ago I went to a vegetarian grilling class with a group of friends. The instructor began by explaining that humans were never meant to be vegetarians, describing in detail the shape of our teeth and what they were made to do – the front teeth made to tear meat apart and the back teeth made to grind it up so we can swallow it. He went on to explain our high protein needs, from the vital part it plays in childhood brain development to ongoing adult needs for protein – something harder get if you don’t live in a first world country. The one vegetarian in our group was, well, taken aback. She didn’t like having her belief’s challenged.

But truth is, I had some sympathy for her. If we’re to look only at science and human history, it’s hard to argue that being peaceful rather than warlike is what we were “meant to be.” And anthropologists tell us time and again that it is not in human nature to be monogamous. But that doesn’t stop us from trying to be peaceful and faithful, nor is human history a reason to dismiss or condescend to people who strive for those ideals.

Don’t we all strive against our natural tendencies to greater or lesser degrees?

What Bourdain was really nibbling at was Maslow’s Need Hierarchy, which we all remember from any psychology class we ever took. People at the bottom of the hierarchy are striving for food, shelter, and safety. Once you have that, you move up the hierarchy and start expecting more, and better. Once you get that you start searching for self-actualization – seeking purpose and meaning in what you do. There is a natural tendency, when we’re at the top of the hierarchy and embarrassed at all the time we spend gazing into our belly-buttons, to think the people scrapping at the bottom are more worthy than us, “more real,” because their needs are more immediate and less petty.

I actually believe that’s true. But I also bet those at the bottom, those in the 3^rd world would trade with us in a heartbeat if given the option. It’s good to be reminded that our lives of comfort can make our concerns a little petty. But it’s also good to have the comforts.

So go on vegetarians - disdain meat. Eat your veggies and your grains. I’ll eat those too, and your share of the meat, and won’t feel bad about you or myself no matter what Anthony Bourdain says.

It’s a little like sex vs. the well-cooked meal Bill Maher asked about. You really shouldn’t have to choose between the two. Take them both, recognize that you’re lucky, but don’t apologize.

Marguerite

This is an excerpt from a much longer piece I wrote about my grandparents for the 2012 edition of the Polk Street Review. To read the full version, stop by The Wild bookstore on the courthouse square in Noblesville and purchase a copy. The book is filled with short stories, poetry, photography and essays from Noblesville folks.

                                              Alvie and Marguerite in the 1960s, as I knew them in my childhood

I never understood Marguerite.

I never satisfied her stern, disapproving stare and pursed lips, rarely broke through her long frozen silences and rarely grasped her perplexing view of the world. 

On the first day of school after Christmas friends gushed about special gifts from their grandparents - new bikes, TVs or a trip to Disneyland. What did my grandmother buy me? Socks and underwear.

After my grandfather, Alvie died, on rare occasions Marguerite stayed at our house in Tipton for a few days at a time. No sooner did she set down her suitcase she’d tie an apron around her waist and go about cleaning our house, emptying trashcans and dusting. If you could see it only as an expressive of the German work ethic she was raised with, it was generous and helpful. But to us it said, “You’re house is dirty.” I don’t think she meant it that way. But that’s how it felt.

I recall at age eight or nine, Marguerite standing over me in a JC Penny’s, disapproving as I tried to buy the Monkeys second album with my birthday money. She knew I had their first album and so read the song titles off the back cover, asking after each, “Are you sure you don’t already have that song on the other record?” It wasn’t enough to simply say, “You’re wasting your money on childish music,” it had to be a protracted standoff, and for the thin-skinned child I was, a needless humiliation in front of other store patrons. 

During our summer visit, my sister Cindy remembers a forced haircut (without our mother’s permission) and a forced diet. No snacks allowed between meals and you got only what you were served at breakfast, lunch, and dinner, whether you liked it or not. We were dumbfounded. The kitchen in our own home was open anytime for a handful of saltines or a cup of Kool-Aid.

As best I can figure, Marguerite had a bleak childhood in the unforgiving flat landscape of northern Indiana during the first World War. She grew up in a tiny town southwest of Bluffton called Poneto. It was barely eight city blocks nestled against a rail line to its west, connecting Ft. Wayne to Hartford City, and to the east was just a small farm field away from an electric Interurban line to Bluffton. Her maiden name was Myers and she would marry a Meyer. She had one sister and three brothers. One of the brothers was mentally ill and committed suicide. Her parents divorced and her father, Guy Myers, moved to Lansing, Michigan.

My father recalls a childhood visit to his grandfather, Guy in Lansing in the late ‘30s or early ‘40s. Guy was working in an auto factory and “shacking-up” with a woman.

There are many, many stories about my grandfather’s upbringing and family yet almost none about my grandmother’s. She just didn’t talk about it.

Guy Myers was an adopted child. His birth parents are unknown. A rumor of shadowy origin suggests that Marguerite had some Mexican or at least “south-of-the-border” blood. She never spoke of this except to deny it once to my mother and on another occasion late in life, when someone admired a beautiful Mexican waitress in a restaurant, Marguerite offered proudly, “Some people think I might have Mexican blood.”

At a Bluffton social gathering 20 years ago I sat next to a distance cousin named Julie. She was the granddaughter of Marguerite’s sister. I asked, “Have you ever heard anything about an ethnic secret in our grandmothers’ family?”

“YES!” she replied emphatically, grabbing my wrist. “What is it?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Hoped you’d know.”

But she didn’t.

While on vacation in Acapulco, my oldest sister, Jama sat in an ocean-side restaurant watching a group of elderly local women as they talked and ate. They had the look of mixed-race women from Central and South America - that mix of Spanish and native ancestry. Jama told her partner, “That’s my grandmother. Every women at that table could be Marguerite.”

When Marguerite finished school, she took a job as a maid, or “hired girl,” as was said in the 1920s, for a well-to-do family in Bluffton. It was apparently during that time she met a young Apostolic man who worked at a gas station and rode a motorcycle, my grandfather, Alvie.

But in my childhood, I knew nothing about any of this.

In Marguerite’s stern exterior and rigid insistence on what was proper, I read an urge to be not only accepted, but also to protect some community notion of what was acceptable. There seemed so little room to maneuver within those rigid expectations, why even try? And so when I was with her I felt I didn’t measure up and eventually didn’t really want to.

When I was 13 her Christmas gift of socks and underwear gave way to checks for $50. I figured she was softening. But once, later in high school, after I’d been dating a girl for a couple months she gave me puzzling advice. “Don’t let yourself get too serious about this girl,” she warned. “When you get to know a person too well you discover their faults and it’s disappointing.”

Later when I dated a girl who was diabetic, she again warned me not to get serious. “If you marry this girl and have babies, they might not be normal.”                                        (at right, Marguerite in the 1920s)

Did she have any idea what it meant to be young and in love? I thought not. Where was the tenderness and warmth? Instead, just warnings and advice that would leave you all alone if you dared take it.           

When I was in college the $50 checks at Christmas turned into $500 checks. By the time I graduated they went up to $1,000. Her generosity only increased her mystery.

In college I wanted to study a semester in London, but my parents refused to pay for it. On a whim I called Marguerite and asked to borrow the money from her. She quickly and easily said yes. When my father found out, he put an end to her loan and loaned me the money himself.

That Christmas money helped fund three more trips to Europe in the ‘80s. But though she approved of the first trip, she didn’t approve of the others. She told me it was a frivolous use of the money. Was she bothered that I was traveling with the money she and Alvie had saved for their failed dream of travel during retirement - though I hadn’t really earned it? It made me wonder why she didn’t travel and live out their dream on her own. Why did she just sit day after day in that apartment on Wayne Street, play cards with her cronies, go to church and eat dinner once a week at the Dutch Mill?

The travel I bought with that money change my life – expanded my view of the world. But there came a time when Marguerite’s influence changed my life even more profoundly.

When I was in college at Ball State, Marguerite once told me to keep an eye out for a young girl she knew, who was also studying there. “She’s such a nice girl. I play canasta with her grandmother.”

I shuddered to imagine the kind of girl Marguerite would find a good fit for me. If Marguerite liked this girl, there must be something wrong with her.

Six months later on the first day of a distance running class the instructor called out that girl’s name. I craned my neck to see what homely Bluffton girl would raise her hand.

But the arm raised high was attached to a slender, blonde, blue-eyed knockout. We ran together a few times, but nothing came of those first few meetings. Two years later Marguerite mentioned the girl again - said she’d bumped into her at the grocery store in Bluffton and that she had asked about me. I was going to Ft. Wayne the next weekend to visit college friends, so I called her and asked her out. On the date I discovered the girl had neither bumped into Marguerite at the store nor asked about me.

We married a year later in Bluffton.

Marguerite had done the most significant thing anyone ever did for me in my life, and she did it with a strategic lie.

In 2001 I published a novel and traveled the state promoting it. One night I gave a book talk for the historical society in Hartford City. There I met an elderly woman who knew my grandmother. She was a schoolgirl when Marguerite was a young newlywed. Living close to my grandparent’s first house, the woman and her girlfriends played near their back porch and looked up to Marguerite. She said they often sat in the kitchen while Marguerite cooked. She described my 20-something grandmother as lighthearted and fun, singing while she cooked and prone to easy laughter. Marguerite would bake them the cut-off trimmings of piecrusts, smeared with butter and sprinkled with cinnamon sugar, and serve it with lemonade.

My sister, Jama doesn’t remember a fun person prone to easy laugher, but she does remember a woman she learned to make peace with.

“I don’t recall her ever saying, ‘I love you,’ or giving me hugs but she encouraged me and showed tenderness in the advice she gave me as an adult. She was stern and firm, but also generous.”

Jama was painfully shy as a child, and was afraid of Marguerite. As she grew, Jama became a standout student and exceptional athlete. Marguerite regularly encouraged and complemented her. In college in Arizona and later living in California, Jama wrote Marguerite a letter every two weeks and made the drive up to Bluffton to visit whenever she was back in Indiana.

During Jama’s marriage, Marguerite read between the lines of the letters that arrived in her Bluffton mailbox, sensing something wasn’t quite right. She responded with letters asking Jama about her marriage: “Does he come home right after work? Does he treat you well?” It was concern and sympathy, sent from a woman who often had a hard time showing it.

Marguerite spent her last several years in a nursing home, and much of the time didn’t really know who anyone was, but often pretended to. When she died my parents were in China. There was no easy way to reach them and no way for them to get home in time for the funeral. My siblings all gathered in Indiana and we went to Bluffton where I stood in for my dad, greeting old family friends alongside my uncle Gene. When the time came, Gene, my brother Tom, my two young sons, and I acted as poll bearers.

Later, my uncle Gene shared with me a photo album found among Marguerite’s things. In old black and white pictures taken in the 1920s, Alvie was young, handsome and looked Great Gatsby-ish with thick, long hair on top, razor-smooth on the sides above his ears. A far cry from the feeble Parkinson’s patient I’d known. And Marguerite was a lovely, happy flapper of sorts. In some photos they sat together on the running board of a Model-T and in others hugged each other lovingly and suggestively, up to their necks in a lake on a long-gone sunny summer day.

The look in their eyes was unmistakable. If you’ve seen someone in the early bloom of love you know that look. There was a giddy, electric expectation in their smiles, a candle-like glow behind their eyes, like every breath was taken with a bird flapping its wings wildly in their throats.

That’s how I would like to remember them.

In my childhood Marguerite so often made me feel like an outsider, unwelcome and unwanted. After looking into those hopeful, loving faces in black and white, I wanted to understand her, wanted to know how that happy, eager young woman became so cold. That young woman never would have let the kind of child I once was feel so isolated, like I didn’t measure up, like I wasn’t good enough.

The photos made it clear that she had known all along what it meant to be young and in love. And in her own manipulative way she found the woman who would be the mother of my children.

What happened in the intervening years to harden her? Some of it I know now and the rest I can guess from my own journey through adulthood and marriage to parenting and into mid-life.

After Marguerites death, what at the time seemed like a staggering sum of money arrived in the mail. It was especially meaningful because my wife and I were living on one teacher’s salary. It was my cut of Alvie and Marguerite’s life savings. Money earned during the ‘30s, ‘40s, and ‘50s, money that was supposed to fund their retirement travels we used instead to restore the front of our Victorian-era home on Cherry Street and rebuild its missing porch. From the first warm day of spring to the last useful day of autumn that year, I climbed scaffolding, swung a hammer and flung a paintbrush, turning Alvie and Marguerite’s money into a restored 1890s home. A fitting tribute.

Marguerite and Alvie in the 1920s

The Gun Fetish

Fetish:  A material object regarded with superstitious or extravagant trust or reverence.

In the wake of the Newtown shootings gun control advocates have proposed pretty mild measures to address gun violence – the kind of measures championed by Ronald Reagan in the ‘80s. In response we’ve seen a convulsion of gun advocacy that is mystifying in its paranoia, extremism, and sheer lack of foundation in reality. The bottom line: Most of what is held up as true about guns is just plain false.

I’m not against gun ownership, but think they should be respected with levelheaded reverence, not fetishized.

The typical TV news gun debate leads us astray from the get-go. The discussion is all about protecting ourselves from bad guys. But most guns deaths have nothing to do with “bad guys.”

The majority of gun deaths in American are a result of accidents and suicide, not crime. But the fetish argument is all about protection, then cascades through a long list of hollow arguments.

When people tell me knives can kill as easily as guns, I start by asking them, “Then why don’t just buy a knife? It’s cheaper and requires no ammo.” Then I challenge them to a dual to solve the debate once and for all: "We are both armed. We walk out 10 paces, turn and attack each other. The person who lives wins the argument. I get a gun and you get a knife. If both are the same, you shouldn’t object."

But they always object.

That’s because guns change everything. Children playing with a knife might cut themselves. Children playing with a gun might kill themselves. People committing suicide with pills or carbon monoxide might get the dose wrong or be found before the poison does its work. People who use a gun usually succeed. And they’re called “drive-bys” because you can kill someone from a car window with a gun. Kinda hard to do the same thing with a knife.

Guns change everything.

“If you ban guns, only criminals will have guns.” Only problem with this argument is that in pretty much every country with gun control (nearly every other western industrial nation), criminals have a hard time getting guns and violent crime and gun deaths are comparatively low. In a typical year America has nearly 13,000 murders. In Japan, a typical annual number is around 10. In England during the past 10 years, an annual number is a low of 18 and a high of 52. Typical year for Germany: 178. I could go on and on, but you get the point. And please don't tell me it's because they're smaller countries. England has a 4th our population. Multiply their murders by 4 and it still won't make you feel any better.

There is even a story going around social media lately claiming that when Australia tightened gun control “12 months ago” gun crime went up. Actually, it wasn’t 12 months ago, it was 16 years ago, and since that time gun deaths have decreased markedly.

I’ve been to Switzerland a couple times. The image at right is about as unlikely as any you’d see there. Guns are issued by the government as part of civil defense. People don't buy them. The guns usually sit in the backs of closets, waiting for a civil defense drill. The country essentially has no gun culture Americans would recognize. But increasingly the Swiss government is rounding up the guns and putting them in armories and depots. That’s because Swiss gun death statistics show what American gun statistics show; put a gun in a home and you increase the chances that someone in that home will be killed with a gun – mostly by suicide or accident.

There are countries with higher gun death rates than America, but you have to go to countries at war, third world countries, or those in Central and South America to find them. Among our international peers, our rate’s the highest. Hands down. No contest. Not even close.

Those with the gun fetish will tell you it’s because we’re soft on crime. Also not true. We have a higher percentage of our population in prison than any other country in the world. We are 5% of the world’s population and house 25% of the world’s prisoners. China, a communist country with 4 times our population, comes in 2^nd.

This little "straw man" message at left . . . this is the most disturbing kind of thing I find online from gun rights supporters. First, I don’t know anyone in a position of power proposing that gun owners turn in their guns. And “the government’s out to kill us” stuff? I can only shake my head in dismay. This one was posted twice on my Facebook feed, both times by college educated Hoosiers.

Women need guns to protect themselves? This notion is maybe the cruelest of all. Why? Because people with guns are more likely to be killed by someone they know than by a stranger. This is especially true for women, who are most likely to be killed by a boyfriend or husband, not an unknown assailant. So ladies, if you’re buying a gun, you’re actually bringing it home to the person statistically most likely to use it against you. When there is a gun in the home, the chances that domestic violence will end in the murder of the woman is multiplied times 8. Women living in a home with a gun are nearly 3 times more likely to be murdered than women living in a home with no gun.

I believe in the 2^nd amendment. Our Constitution protects the right to own a gun. But I don’t own a gun because I know it makes me less safe. I don't hunt and I already live in one of the safest places in the world; Hamilton County, Indiana.

If more guns will make us safer, America should be the safest country in the world. We have more private guns per capita than any other nation on earth. Instead, we have the highest gun death rate among developed nations and a higher percentage of our population in prison than any other nation on earth. Clearly more guns aren’t the answer.

Not all gun owners have the gun fetish. Many understand how dangerous they are. They’re hunters or folks who live in a dangerous neighborhood. They train themselves and their family how to use them properly, lock them up when not in use and don’t glamorize or defend beyond reason the ownership of assault weapons and high-capacity magazines. They’re not afraid of background checks and they’re not conspiracy-theory loonies who think they need a gun to protect themselves from Obama's government. They don’t laugh off gun-buy back programs, understanding that people who don’t want a gun in their homes are the last people who should have them (and they probably also know that many criminals get guns by stealing them from the homes of law-abiding citizens).

But those with the gun fetish seem to think guns solve everything. In the wake of Newtown, they actually think more guns in schools is the answer, not knowing or caring that when a gunman killed 13 and wounded 21 at Columbine High School there was an armed guard on duty, or that when a gunman killed 32 and wounded 17 at Virginia Tech, the university had it’s own police force, or that when a gunman killed 13 and wounded 29 at Fort Hood, it happened on a !MILITARY BASE! where guns are bountiful. If armed soldiers on a military base can't prevent a mass shooting, what good is a rent-a-cop at North Elementary!

Ignoring such realities is what fetishes are made of; irrational, blind affection focused on an object.

We'd Make Great Pets

The dog squatted down and shit right there on the rug! Right there in front of us, as if on cue. By shear perfection of comedic timing, it was my most memorable moment as a pet owner.

We’d only had Hanna a couple weeks. She was a rescue whippet, twitchy and needy and nervous all the time. But in those first two weeks she’d been so good, so obedient. Then came a Sunday dinner at my parents and we brought Hanna along. I stood in the living room with my aunt explaining Hanna’s brilliance, how she never barked and never had an accident on the rug. And just as I was bragging on her – at that very moment, she (Hanna, not my aunt) squatted down and shit right there on the rug in front of us, looking up with a sorrowful apology in her eyes that would become so familiar in the years ahead.

Hanna, looking worried. Her standard expression.

Hanna only barked a few times in all the years we owned her. She slept 20 of the 24 hours in a day, followed you around like a shadow for 3 hours and 50 minutes of what was left, and in that final 10 minutes when you let her out to do her business, she rocketed around the yard like a bullet on crack.

In all my years as a pet owner, Hanna was our only dog. Ours has been a house with a succession of cats.

Rudy came to me when I was single, left by friends who were moving out west. His original name was Yoko, but when my ex-wife came into my life, she renamed him Rudy. He was a Siamese cat and smart as hell. Loved that cat.

Our first house in Noblesville was the big white Victorian the city tore down for the City Hall parking lot. We were so poor we pretty much turned off the heat at night. To stay warm, Rudy would slip under the covers up by the pillows, then burrow down to our feet. He’d get overheated and burrow back out after awhile. Sometime you’d wake in the night and find him curled around your head on the pillow.

One cold winter night Rudy was burrowing out and got the covers and my ex’s flannel nightgown mixed up, crawling up her gown without noticing. She woke with a frantic cat trapped against her chest, and so she was immediately frantic, unbuttoning the neck so he could get out.

I stayed home from work one day when my son Jack was 4 or 5 years old. During the morning we found Rudy had died where he often slept, curled up under my bed. He’d gone peacefully. I wrapped Rudy in an old blanket, dug a hole behind the garage and buried him, making a grave marker from a landscaping timber, spelling “Rudy” on it with a router. Jack watched all of this with fascination. When his older brother Cal got off the school bus, Jack led him to the grave and told him all about Rudy’s death and burial. Then he asked me if we could dig up Rudy so Cal could see.

Orion was our next cat and he was the baddest motherfucker to ever hunt the 1100 block alley between Maple & Cherry. He was a yellow-orange tabby with stunningly vibrant colors, had the heft of a smallish dog and looked like he’d been lifting weights. He always stayed near me and shared the couch each night when I relaxed with my gin and tonic. He roamed the neighborhood during the day but ran to the back door each night when I called his name.

Orion, being his bad self.

If I found him a block away and he followed me home, I’d ask him questions along the way. “How was your day, Mr. Cat?” “Meow,” he would respond, trotting along beside me. As long as I asked questions, he would meow in response.

And he was forever killing things. On a warm summer night when my daughter Sally was small, she heard a tiny, pathetic squealing in the back yard. She peered from the kitchen windows searching the yard. I went out to investigate and found Orion standing over a dying rabbit he was in the process of killing. I went back in and lied to Sally, “Orion saved us from a rat. He fought it in the back yard and thankfully Orion won.

And though Sally was our animal-lover and took to every creature she ever knew, Orion hated her. Perhaps he kept her at bay so she wouldn’t dress him up in doll clothes. Once as he sat upright on the kitchen bench, about eye-level to Sally, she came close and reached out her hand to him. He swatted hard at her palm and she ran to me calling, “Daddy, Orion just gave me a high-five!” How could I tell her he really wanted to scratch her eyes out? But she learned. Several times when she tried to approach him face to face he reared back with his right and coldcocked her upside the head with an open paw and bared claws. She’d come running to me in tears, stunned that an offer of kindness could result in such needless violence.

So Sally got a snuggable kitten named Nina, and though cute at first, Nina grew into the most disgusting cat I’ve ever known.

Nina was bullied by Orion. This kept her away from the food dish until he was done eating. So when Nina got her chance she gulped food in a desperate rush. Over-filled with food, she would soon vomit. She was on an unforgiving binge and purge cycle, so much so that even when Orion was outside and she could eat in leisure, she’d binge and purge anyway out of sheer force of habit.

But somehow she still managed to become morbidly obese: a waddling, gelatinous, furry ball with legs and a tiny head.

You know your cat is too fat when it can’t lick it’s own ass. Sometimes after she threw-up, she’d lie down and actually try to clean herself down there, perhaps to take the taste of vomit out of her mouth. She’d strain and struggle like a weakling trying to do a sit-up, but just couldn’t reach it.  This is the sort of thing that gets a pet owner like me thinking about a one-way trip to the vet.

But one day after being let out to play in the back yard, she just never came home.

And that of course is the hardest part about having pets: they die.

Orion eventually got sickly thin. Those muscular shoulders went bony. The sheen left his once brilliant coat, and he didn’t hurry in when I called him at bedtime. I got to picking him up in the back yard at night and carrying him inside. But he’d still meow back if I asked him a question. Returning home from a week’s vacation, the friend who was tending Orion said she hadn’t seen him at all the day before we returned. I found him laying on a step halfway up the basement stairs. He was alive, but too weak to go any further. It’s heartbreaking to see an old friend that way.

And that silent dog Hanna – the one that never barked? When her time came for a one-way trip to the vet, my ex-wife held her close while the vet administered the shot. As the drug pumped through her veins Hanna began to bark like she’d never barked before.

Which reveals another truth about these animals we bring into our lives. They know, see and understand things we hardly suspect. And wondering at that mystery is perhaps the heart of the beauty of the relationship we share with them. 

Alvie

This is an excerpt from a much longer piece I wrote about my grandparents for the 2012 edition of the Polk Street Review. To read the full version, stop by The Wild bookstore on the courthouse square in Noblesville. The book is filled with short stories, poetry, photography and essays from Noblesville folks.

My grandparents, Alvie and Marguerite lived in Bluffton, the seat of Wells County, just south of Ft. Wayne. Their home was a three-bedroom ranch on Stodgill Road among a typical strip of ranch houses, the kind that sprung up on the edges of Midwestern towns after World War II, the kind with deep front lawns and no sidewalks. They’d had it built themselves. They paid for everything upfront, with Alvie meeting contractors and lumber company deliverymen, paying them on the spot with cash – money carefully saved from his career as a postal worker.

Their home had a lush lawn that Alvie tended with the professional determination of a golf course greens keeper. During childhood visits I often sat on his riding mower in the garage, pretending to drive or puzzling over the heavy roller the mower pulled around the yard to make the lawn as smooth as a floor laid with deep shag carpet.

One morning when I was maybe 6 or 7 years old, Alvie took me to the bowling alley where his buddies met for coffee and a few frames. While he was in the restroom his retired friends enlisted me in a practical joke. They prepped me with the answer to a question. When Alvie returned, one of them asked, “Kurt, are you a Republican or a Democrat?” I responded as prompted, “Democrat.” I still recall the hoots of laughter and the scowl on Alvie’s face.

It was prophetic. I am a Democrat to this day.

My father told me once Alvie disliked FDR for the New Deal, for growing government and making people dependent upon it. When I pondered that as a young man, I figured it must have been easier to cast such judgments when you had a safe, government, Post Office job during the great depression.

I recall Alvie’s disapproval of comic books and wasting time and his narrowed eye and menacing growl when I said once I didn’t like the food served at dinner. I ate it.

He was raised in a German Apostolic farm family, the third youngest of fourteen children. Their rural community spoke a Swiss-German brogue. At church, men sat on one side of the aisle and women on the other. Once as a child he was so frustrated with having nothing of his own and no way to have fun, he stole a chicken from his own parents’ farm, sold it to a huckster wagon and bought something for himself alone. Alvie left school at sixteen as all the kids in his family did, but after a year away, convinced his parents to let him go back. He graduated high school in 1924, left the farm and moved to town, got a job at a gas station, bought a motorcycle, left the Apostolic church and became a Methodist.

As a child I tried to imagine him on a motorcycle, but the portly 60-something-year-old man with wire-framed glasses that I knew didn’t seem much like the motorcycle type. More like the type to disapprove of them.

But he wasn’t always a sour puss. There was ice cream after dinner at his urging. On occasions he’d rope a sheet of plywood to the back of the lawn tractor and pull us kids around the yard. At a Meyer family reunion in Bluffton he caught me reaching for a third Orange Crush from a galvanized feed trough filled with ice and bobbing soda pop bottles. He nodded and winked, “Aw, go ahead. Who’s counting?” Fishing with him in the tall grass along the Wabash at the end of Stogdill Road, I threw a rock in the water, lost my balance and fell in, or as Alvie put it, “You forgot to let go of the rock.”

He took me home, put me in the bathtub, and as he scrubbed the river mud from my hair made me promise not to tell Marguerite what had happened. “She might not let us fish anymore,” he worried.

When my father visited his parents on Stogdill Road in the years after he graduated college, sometimes Alvie would offer to show him something in the garage. Once there, Alvie pulled a bottle of Manischewitz wine from a workbench hiding place and they passed it back and forth.

For some-40 years Alvie had doggedly worked and methodically saved for retirement, but cruel- ly, by the time retirement arrived the tremors of Parkinson’s arrived with it. Still, he and Mar- guerite took a train trip across Mexico. It was the first of what they hoped would be many trips. With a gentle palsy in his hands and mild shuffle to his gait, he was an easy target. A pickpocket stole his wallet. Later, not feeling well and needing a doctor, they couldn’t find one. That helplessness scared Alvie out of traveling again, though he’d saved his whole life to do it.

He would later tell my father, “I should have spent more of my money along the way and enjoyed life, instead of saving it all for retirement.”

Alvie corresponded with doctors near Jacksonville, Florida where groundbreaking work was being done on Parkinson’s. He had two surgeries in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He was sedated, but kept awake as doctors drilled a hole in his skull. They put a probe in his brain and moved it about, looking to touch a place that would still the tremors in his hands. It didn’t work.

In relentless steps the Parkinson’s stole his quality of life, the ability to function independently and perhaps even his will to live. As his condition worsened, he and Marguerite often took slow, plodding walks near the Stogdill Road house. She would steady and support him with her arm wrapped tightly around his. On one such walk he told her, “I wish I had two tickets to heaven.” Marguerite asked, “Why two?” He replied, “Because I don’t want to go alone.”

But he did go alone.

Parkinson’s drove Alvie into near silence and a wheelchair. The last time he spoke to me I was eleven years old. He was lying flat on his back on my parents’ bed where he’d been laid to nap during a holiday gathering. This was a time when he seldom spoke, and when he tried, I usually couldn’t understand him. But as I covered him with a blanket, he said in perfectly clear diction, “You’re a good boy, Kurt.”

I had so often recoiled at his repulsive infirmities, I felt unworthy of the compliment.

With his muscles so weak he sometimes choked on food. Marguerite would force her fingers into his mouth to clear his windpipe. Early one morning as she fed him, he began to choke, but this time clenched his teeth so she couldn’t get her fingers into his mouth.

And that’s how Alvie died; he choked to death in a wheelchair while Marguerite tried to save him.

I had never seen my father cry. But at Alvie’s funeral in the Bluffton Methodist Church, when the minister got to the part that reads, “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil,” I heard a chilling wail of sorrow rise up and fill the sanctuary. It was my father. Seeing my dad cry, made me cry. But even though I was a young boy I understood I wasn’t crying for Alvie, because I didn’t fully understand what death meant. I was crying for my father.

My dad told me later, “Funerals are not for the dead. They’re for the living.”

Alvie in the 1920s.

Reflecting Light

Leaving a sales training class at my company’s corporate offices I passed the open doorway to a friend’s office and decided to duck in and check on her. I wound my way through a maze of cubicles and found her on the phone. Radiant sunshine from a brilliant blue December sky washed through a window and into her workspace. She turned and smiled at me. Light reflected all around, sparkling off her necklace and earrings.

Heather hung up the phone.

When we speak we are usually comparing notes, so when I asked, “How’s it going?” she immediately described how things were going now that she moved back in with her husband. I was happy for her. She’s been seeking resolution in her marriage for a long time, and this felt like a step closer. No uncertainty reflected from her face. Only peace.

This comparing of notes began a year and a half ago on a summer evening. Both working late, we found ourselves on computers side by side in the office workroom. When the chitchat started we were acquaintances, but by conversation’s end we’d both shed a few tears at relating that we were separated from our spouses. Both of us were the ones who pulled the trigger, the ones who took action to confront marital unhappiness.

During two years of separation and impending divorce, I kept an ear open for others in this situation and learned so much comparing notes with them. Our experiences are so similar.

The first in a troubled marriage to reach the end of their rope suffers a unique kind of pain, a pain so black it radiates no colors, and so no one can seem to see it. They are often treated by in-laws as if they died, friends seldom call to offer support, their children seldom author loving, encouraging notes and texts, friends who don’t understand are quick with biting comments. Some are trying to punish them for upsetting their ordered world, but most often, it’s simply because it appears the one who left went to get something else, and so now must be happy.

From comparing notes, I know that’s almost never true. The pain it took to get to the end of that rope was kept hidden amid private hopes it would all work out. And when they reveal their own pain, transmitting pain to a spouse and often children, they get isolated, ignored and shunned when they need support the most. And that accumulated pain remains invisible to those around them. Only the pain caused to others by falling from the end of the rope is sympathized with.

Heather and I began having an occasional lunch and from time to time sent each other encouraging text messages. Without people like her who understood what I was going through, I wonder where my mental health would be right now.

At a big, drunken karaoke party this past summer Heather and I sang a duet together; “You’re The One That I Want,” from Grease. As we skipped off the stage I caught a glimpse of her estranged husband in the crowd, standing alone, jealous and hurting. In the months after, I sought him out wherever I found him – grocery store, local theater, downtown bar, and spoke to him so he could see I wasn’t a threat.

I have compared notes with so many people in the past two years.

At a bar a year ago, a friend approached me and nodded toward the corner, “See my friend Jenna over there? She’s leaving her husband and going through a tough time. I left that bar stool next to her empty for you. You’re in the thick of the same thing and you’re a Realtor. Maybe you can help her find a place to live and offer some words of comfort in the process.”

I did, and Jenna and I became good friends. The painful road I watched her walk took my breath away time and time again. She remains one of the most amazingly resilient people I know.

As a child, I saw a dog get hit by a car. It ran across our lawn violently thrashing about in agony. I often thought of that as I watched Jenna's husband appear at the bar that spring, fresh from the concussion of loss, causing one ugly scene after another, willfully thrashing about, reflecting misery off the fractured shards of his broken heart onto her . . . and me.

Back at Heather’s cubicle, she nodded gratefully toward an email open on the glowing screen. The brilliant sunlight reflected off tears welling-up in her eyes as she smiled. She sighs and takes a deep, ragged breath. “When we separated, my mother-in-law just stopped talking to me.” She quiets to a whisper, so overcome by emotion it’s all she can muster. “She had been one of my best friends ever. It was so hard to be shunned that way. But my husband recently asked her to communicate with me and she has, emailing me to ask about my new job.”

How typical Heather’s separation story is. Family members quickly circle the wagons around their child or sibling. And in doing so, without realizing, they’re withdrawing support from the very relationship they want to survive. This plants new resentments, adding to the conflict. When the relationship has fewer supporters, it’s less likely to survive.

But we’re the “perpetrators.” You’re not supposed to be on our side. You’re supposed to side with the “victim.” A life’s consumption of storybook, TV and film plot lines hardwires us to reflexively identify the perpetrators and victims, the antagonists and protagonists. That way we know who to side with. Maybe that’s why we perpetrators seek each other and find common threads of comforting light, emitted through shared circumstances.

“Misery loves company?” Maybe. It also heals in the iridescent sparkle of empathy.

In my years teaching photography, I always began by explaining to students that we don’t really see the objects around us. Instead our eyes perceive light reflecting off of them. If an object reflects all colors, we perceive white. If it absorbs all colors, we perceive black. And objects that reflect varying amounts of light we can perceive with all the colors of the rainbow.

We are all like that in life, reflecting peace, love, sadness, anger, loss. And like light, some of what we emit is absorbed by those around us and some bounces off others and reflects back to us. Sometimes we’re saddened by what doesn’t bounce back - what we loose in the blackness of others or what people can’t see in the blackness in us. And sometimes we don’t’ recognize the wavelengths we’re putting out and the colors that reflect back to us are painful to acknowledge.

Pragmatists call it, “just deserts.” Buddhists call it “karma.” Calvinists call it, “God’s will.”  Whatever you call it, it can’t be denied. We are all reflecting light. This reality screams at you when you reach the end of your marital rope.

My divorce was final on December 14^th, but over Christmas I scanned through Facebook status updates and see several posts from Heather about the happy, healing Christmas she’s having back in her home with her husband and children. I can’t help but smile for her.

For a musical take on the subject, give Sam Phillips a listen:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gu6i3EMeoW0